Notes:

RCA received tapes from Sam Phillips in December 1955, and where no tapes existed they used dubs from SUN singles for their 'Masters'.

Elvis At Sun (Restoration)

There exists a fantastic original 15 ips SUN tape copy for the masters of the fifth and last SUN single I Forgot to Remember to Forget (C&W side) and Mystery Train (R&B side). This tape was handed over by Sam in January 1956 and is therefore referred to as the 16th SUN Tape Box. The tape was first used for the 50's Box, but has now been retransferred flat by Sony with even better results in spite of the flat, original, unprocessed sound. This is partly due to better NAB calibration.

The new transfer of I Forgot to Remember To Forget has already found its way to two recent releases. First the 2003 upgrade of 'Great Country Songs' and later the same year it was used for 'Second to None'. The introduction of noise-shaping when converting back to 1-bit DSD native after first converting to 8-bit PCM-narrow in the Sonoma environment to allow equalization isn't very impressive on either one of them, especially considering the result was aimed at 16 bit PCM only. However, the slight above 10 kHz raise done by Sony for these two releases isn't considered out of place at all - it's right on target actually. It's just the method that seems a little complicated. The distorted clipping of vocal peaks on 'Second to None' is simply devastating since this source has so much dynamic range. The 'Great Country Songs' version was clipped as well, but not nearly as much. The 'Elvis at SUN' version of I Forgot to Remember to Forget is a slight improvement with total absence of clipping being the only major audible difference compared to 'Great Country Songs'. 

The equally great new Sony transfer of the unprocessed, dynamic Mystery Train makes its debut here on 'Elvis at SUN'. The original, full-ending-to-the last-note version derived from lost Sun Tape Box #1 (that was reported to us by Sven Adamski in 1999) has been recovered from the best available source (tape copy with compression and severe generation loss) and matched with precision during the fade-out, using all the tricks in the book and for once stretching all the 'Elvis at SUN' restoration rules. The result of this impossible task is stunning considering the circumstances. 

According to Sam Phillips Trying to Get to You would have been the R&B side of Elvis' sixth SUN single. Unfortunately the surviving RCA copies suffer from more compression than usual and not even this Sony transfer of the recovered RCA 30 ips tape can do anything about that. It is a shame how the compression takes over during the loud vocal parts, but apart from that the new source and version isn't all that bad, at least not compared to what has been released before.